Public Services International (PSI), as part of its advocacy and organizing work in the social care sector in the Andean region, seeks to strengthen the capacity of its unions to advocate for quality public services and decent work. To this end, a workshop was organized in early April, in collaboration with the National Trade Union School (ENS), to present the Organizing for Power program to union representatives from PSI affiliates such as ADEA, FECOTRASERVIPÚBLICOS, SINTRAMBIENTE, SINTRADISTRITALES, SINTRAESTATALES, SUNET, as well as ASTROMETROSALUD and UTRASD.

The Organizing for Power methodology is an online training program for organizers around the world created in 2019 as a collaboration between the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and union organizer Jane McAlevey. The program is based on organizing a strong structure that makes it possible to get supermajorities in actions.

The workshop was a space for debate and joint reflection with inputs and tools to strengthen union action and thus increase its power. Through different sessions the participants learned to identify natural leaders, the importance of semantics when talking to others, structured organizing conversations, structure tests or mini-campaigns that are done to test power and the registration of these to follow up. All this in order to have enough tools to build a plan to win the necessary changes in the workplace.

During all the sessions the participants were invited to reflect, in group exercises and role plays, on the topics discussed and to think in a different logic that allows them to join forces with other unions and people in their workplace regardless of their type of contract. This in order to reduce the union atomization faced by the union world in Colombia and to increase the union power that has been decreasing over the years.

Catalina Flórez, from SINTRAMBIENTE, added that "the relevance of this workshop is that it provides practical elements so that in work environments we can demystify those collective imaginaries that have been built negatively around trade unionism in Colombia. It provides tools for work teams to replicate and operationalize in a more practical way for the defense of labor rights".

Adriana Mesa Restrepo, president of SINTRAESTATALES sub-directorate Bello, said "I found the workshops very important, innovative and relevant, because they made us recognize errors of perception, action and semantics that we are committing in union actions and that we did not realize that with them we were not including or giving appropriation tools of union actions to our affiliates or to our coworkers".